New Sockets

[crisbduck]

Hi, I hear a lot of people advising against certain cpus because of their socket,
I was just wondering if this only really applies to people wanting to change cpus every few years?
I'd hope every new pc I get can last at least 5 years, so I'm guessing its extremely likely I'll need a new motherboard after this amount of time anyway.
Cheers if you can clear this up for me xx

 

[Simon42]

The socket issue is indeed only important if you plan on changing the processor during the life of the motherboard. I upgrade regularly as I need a good PC for work I do, but I've rarely upgraded the CPU in the existing motherboard due to wanting other features only available on new motherboards.

My advice to anyone upgrading only every 3 - 4 years is just ensure you get something that will do what you need it to do now with a little extra capacity as future proofing is almost impossible with computers anyway. It's also better to spend less and upgrade more frequently than try to buy something that will last a long time.

 

[cmndr_andi]

If you don't plan on upgrading for several years, then you shouldn't concern yourself with socket longevity - as you won't be doing any drop0in upgrading.

However, people often talk about "sockets" when they mean chipsets and their pros and cons. For example the 1366 socket is the only socket which uses the excellent X58 chipset. This chipset is revered as it (in conjuction with the i7 CPU) allows for triple channel memory, 2 x16 PCIe v2 lanes for graphics cards and excellent overclocking. Meanwhile, s1156 often refers to the P55 - which has different features compared to the X58. For this usage of "socket" it will apply and performance will be affected.

 

[crisbduck]

Thanks guys, thats extremely helpful!

 

[Avalon]

Above posts are pretty much spot on, I had to build a 'new' workstation this week and faced the same socket dilemma, here's what I did and why:

The old box was a P4 2.8HT/1.5GB DDR/160GB 7.2k IDE HD/64MB AGP GF4 MX4000(!) - nothing was salvaged. The main issues were the high CPU load, significant waiting while tracing in Vector Magic and inability to multi-task at the level required. Larger jobs over the years have lead to longer and longer pauses for files to open/save.

Firstly for a number of reasons (both software and hardware) this box has to run XP in 32bit form and this won't change (unless we spend a hell of a lot of time and more money). That limits me to 4GB of RAM or less and doesn't allow for TRIM without a dedicated wiper app. Corel is also not extensively optimised for SMP but multiple cores will allow for significantly improved multitasking (IO performance permitting).

I decided that the premium for an 'i' based CPU/MB/DDR3 offered little over a Q6600 for our planned usage so committed to a Q6600/4GB DDR2 and M225 64GB SSD. The CPU/MB/RAM is all EOL hardware but as pointed out more RAM is pointless in a 32bit environment and the Q6600 is probably overkill at this stage it provides the headroom for the future and true multitasking now.

So as long as you understand your usage requirements (both fixed and variable) and plan your purchases accordingly, leaving sufficient margin for growth then socket type is largely irrelevant as using your anticipated life cycle of 5 years pretty much everything will be redundant and with the possible exception of memory most things decrease in value once they cease to be current.